This wouldn't be so surprising ordinarily -- there are over 21,000 pulsar recipes just so far in my latest apgsearch run, and I bet there are quite a few more binary systems. But these two both showed up in the same soup...!

velcrorex wrote:Been doing some experiments with symmetrical soups, not sure how useful any of these are...

I've been doing some multi-day searches on a spare quad-core machine, with the faint hope of straining some new Life form out of the soup -- a new puffer, maybe, or at least something really unlikely like a loafer that's never been seen escaping from random starting conditions before. No luck so far...!

Maybe not surprisingly, my highest-scoring soups so far have tended to settle into a symmetrical state. My only soup with a score of 50 so far has been this one, with bilaterally symmetric ash:

Not strictly natural, because I found it by adding symmetry options to apgsearch, but this 2-engine switch-engine variation happened (the program calls it 'yl576_1_246_756156edd5c2c10ac5bc316e7c8f38ef'):

Did a 10M apgsearch run in Life and the highest score was 35--ten higher than the next-highest. The soup creates a mold and two LWSSs. Don't know if that's an unusual high score in apgsearch yet, so, here.